tape trading

["Mark Brown" <markbrow@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

This appeared on a Springsteen list this week. Sorry if someone already 
posted it.:

Trade a Tape, Go to Jail?
             by Steve Silberman (from Wired)

             6:47pm  7.Jan.98.PST
             Compared to the March super-bust of 13
             individuals in 12 countries on 40 counts of
             conspiring to manufacture and distribute bootleg
             CDs, the shutting down of a single Web site by
             the administration of a small East Coast university
             may seem insignificant. 

             The implications of the shutdown, however -
             following a series of letters to the university by the
             Recording Industry Association of America - are
             causing ripples in the online world of tape traders,
             fans for whom a trickle of studio albums by their
             favorite artists isn't enough. 

             Why did the RIAA single out this site - not much
             different from thousands of others on the Net,
             where traders post their "lists" in hopes of
             expanding their collections - threatening the site's
             owner with a five-year jail sentence and a
             US$250,000 fine for copyright infringement? 

             Unlike several Pearl Jam fan sites shut down by
             RIAA threats in recent months, the site - which
             was run by a university staffer who asked not to be
             identified - never featured advance, unauthorized
             copies of studio releases. The site was devoted
             strictly to the trading of high-quality concert
             recordings, some of which were recorded by the
             staffer himself, a Bruce Springsteen aficionado
             well-respected by other online traders. 

             His troubles began a few weeks ago, when email
             arrived from someone in Washington, DC, who
             said they wanted to conduct a trade. The
             particular kind of exchange requested was what is
             known in trading circles as a "newbie trade,"
             newbie being the term for someone who is just
             getting started in the world of trading, and who
             thus usually cannot offer a swap of one show for
             another. 

             Newbie trades often involve the trading of one live
             recording for one or two blank tapes, the extra
             blank being the payment for the trader's time and
             effort in copying the tape. Most traders, obviously,
             would rather enlarge their collections than trade for
             blanks, but when a trader's collection reaches a
             certain level of comprehensiveness, there's not
             much out there left to trade. At that point, many
             traders retire from the circuit, or only trade with
             other connoisseurs for extreme rarities. Other
             traders - wanting to give something back to the
             trading community - make the fruits of their years
             of hunting and gathering available to newbies. 

             The university staffer says he spent up to 25 hours
             a week "spinning" tapes, many of them for
             newbies. The sheer volume of mail moving through
             his house - blank cassettes, self-addressed
             bubble-wrap envelopes, postage - became
             overwhelming. 

             "People would send me boxes of 100 blanks and
             ask me to make them 50 tapes," he recalls. "I
             was trading with people all over the world." 

             Finally, he decided to streamline the operation by
             asking newbies to send him $6 for one tape,
             instead of two blanks and return postage. He didn't
             make any profit, he says, and his wife was happier
             with the reduced volume of mail. "I thought I was
             helping everyone," he says. 

             To the RIAA, however, a Web site proffering
             unauthorized recordings for cash, even with no
             profit margin, smells like a professional
             bootlegging operation. In the eyes of the group's
             Anti-Piracy Unit, the site was a "commercial
             operation." The staffer maintains that his site was
             run purely "to spread the music." 

             The issue became even more complex in
             December, with the passage of the No Electronic
             Theft Act, designed to boost penalties for illegal
             copying of software and other intellectual property
             - including concert recordings and videos - for
             "financial gain." For traders, one particularly
             unsettling section of the law defines "financial
             gain" as "the receipt, or expectation of receipt, of
             anything of value, including the receipt of other
             copyrighted works." 

             So is tape trading now illegal by definition - even
             trades where no money changes hands? 

             Yes and no. Director Steve D'Onofrio says the
             Anti-Piracy Unit looks at the scale of trading
             involved. "One individual trading with one individual
             is not a problem," he says. 

             The RIAA's position "has been to focus on
             commercial businesses where there is blatant
             copyright infringement," D'Onofrio says, singling
             out MPEG archive sites where unauthorized
             recordings are uploaded and downloaded directly
             from the Net - especially sites offering studio
             material before the release date. 

             So can old-school snail-mail traders relax? Not
             quite. When a trader posts his or her list to the
             Web, D'Onofrio says, they approach the "very thin
             line" between commercial sites and
             non-commercial sites. 

             In D'Onofrio's view, when a trader puts his list
             online, "then it's not just one person trading a
             tape. The entire world can get on the Internet. It's
             a much larger problem." The RIAA has also
             decided to target .edu sites, which it believes are
             hotbeds of copyright infringement and marketing of
             unauthorized recordings - "particularly universities
             that allow students to develop their own Web
             sites," D'Onofrio says. 

             Thickening the plot, the RIAA regards newbie
             trades of one show for two blanks as a kind of
             profiteering. 

             Most online traders, however, will not wake up
             tomorrow morning and find RIAA letters in their
             mailboxes, as that Springsteen collector did,
             which resulted in the university taking down his
             site and stripping him of his email address. 

             D'Onofrio says the RIAA usually will not move
             forward with an investigation until it has a signed
             affidavit from the artist to do so. Though some
             artists discourage all trading of unofficial
             recordings, others - like Phish, Widespread Panic,
             and the Allman Brothers - encourage online tape
             trading as a way of building their audience. 

             "Arguably, if there were no live tapes, people who
             wanted to hear Phish live would be forced to buy
             the albums. But the audience would be far
             smaller," observes Shelly Culbertson, ticketing
             and Internet manager for Phish, which has
             released two live albums in the past three years,
             despite the fact that there are hundreds of live
             Phish tapes available from traders on the Net. 

             Culbertson believes the band is "actively
             accommodating" tapers and traders with special
             tapers' seats at concerts, and said that
             non-interference with fan Web sites like phish.net,
             has been "more effective, from a publicity point of
             view, than radio and MTV." 

             Rich Breton, an online Springsteen trader with over
             200 hours of live performances in his collection,
             thinks the RIAA should draw firmer distinctions
             between traders who are circulating the music for
             the love of it, and those who are in the game for
             profit. 

             "When it comes down to newbie trades, there
             should be some sort of guidelines to allow
             personal use," Breton says. Most of the traders he
             knows make a "huge distinction" between
             pre-release copies of studio material and live
             tapes, he says. 

             Besides, Breton observes, "Anyone I know who
             trades already has all the official releases, and if
             they're really into it, they even have the import
             CDs with special extra tracks." 

             While the RIAA's D'Onofrio allows that small-scale
             traders have "not been a major issue up to now,"
             he says, "the Net changes everything."